Not exactly a problem that needs solution, but thought I'd post this here just to see if anyone's bumped into something similar.

What happened was, we were doing a mix with a not-exactly-beginning sound guy, did the drum and guitar EQs pretty quickly ("by the book") and spent a lot of time on everything else. We thought we had a final mix down, but when I brought the thing to my (cheap-ish) home stereo there was a VERY annoying hiss all over the place. Turned out the drum and guitar tracks were acting up together - neither of them on their own. The problem was eventually solved by tweaking both the drum and guitar EQs back and forth, and just to be safe we added a pretty drastic low-pass filter to the final mix (which is OK now).

Thing is, we still don't know what exactly caused the problem, and fixing it was pure trial and error. Never happened to me before and (more importantly) not to this sound guy either. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately I don't have any of it at home or on my PC, and the earlier version probably doesn't even exist anymore (didn't keep the disc I had of it). I realize the info I gave is pretty sparse as to actually solving the problem, but I was mainly interested in hearing if someone has similar experiences.

I don't really know that much about sound engineering, but the only thing I can think of is some fuckup in recording that went unnoticed until it was too late.

Well, that was because everything seemed to be in order. The problem didn't show up at all on the pro monitors we were using, which is pretty weird in itself since we had reference CDs and everything. And there were a lot of vocal and keyboard tracks that needed a lot more work - or that's what it seemed like at the time. But it's solved now, anyway.

Quick question(s) about rhythm guitar processing. For all my songs, I use two rhythm tracks, panned about 75% left and 75% respectively. Now that I've upgraded to computer-based recording, I can finally delve into the joys of EQ, compression, and all those wonderful things that make recorded music sound so nice.

Do I EQ and compress both rhythm tracks the same? They're recorded with the same guitar/amp setup. Would I benefit from slight differences in the EQ on each guitar, to make each track stand apart a little? And I guess related to this, would I benefit from using two separate guitars, possibly even two separate guitars and amps, so each rhythm track can have a more "individual" sound?

_________________Music For The Dead Death, doom, black, grind, and more. New albums out from Eternal Oblivion and Devourer in the Mist.

Do I EQ and compress both rhythm tracks the same? They're recorded with the same guitar/amp setup. Would I benefit from slight differences in the EQ on each guitar, to make each track stand apart a little? And I guess related to this, would I benefit from using two separate guitars, possibly even two separate guitars and amps, so each rhythm track can have a more "individual" sound?

I myself uses different settings for each guitar but post-EQ them the same afterwards

Quick question(s) about rhythm guitar processing. For all my songs, I use two rhythm tracks, panned about 75% left and 75% respectively. Now that I've upgraded to computer-based recording, I can finally delve into the joys of EQ, compression, and all those wonderful things that make recorded music sound so nice.

Do I EQ and compress both rhythm tracks the same? They're recorded with the same guitar/amp setup. Would I benefit from slight differences in the EQ on each guitar, to make each track stand apart a little? And I guess related to this, would I benefit from using two separate guitars, possibly even two separate guitars and amps, so each rhythm track can have a more "individual" sound?

I usually don't compress distorted guitars too much, except for an occasional multiband compression to tame the lows on palm mutes.

I used to like having a different left and right guitar sound... Now I prefer having the same guitar tone for left and right. It sounds much tighter.

When doing a mix should I focus on making all the tracks heard (what I usually do) or make an instrument or two "shine" more than the others?(what i read on some site)

how can i make my mix have more space,is it a matter of mastering here?

can someone recommend me a good book\site\tips that could help me to advance in mixing.

thanks in advance

What you do with a mix is entirely your own choice. If your playing symphonic metal (just an example) you'll want the symphonics to stand out, so you would EQ around the main fundamentals. You decide what instrument/s you want to be the focal point, and adjust the other sounds based on that.

Giving a mix more space can mean several things; firstly, we might mean a wide stereo image. Double tracking guitars, or even just a basic pseudo-stereo will do that ie. record a guitar line, feed a mono signal to one channel, pan it hard left; take a split of the guitar line, feed it through a delay unti with about 10-20milliseconds of delay and the lowest feedback setting, and pan that signal hard right. This can sound a bit amateur, but if you automate the delay TIME (only by 3-4 ms) it can sound a bit more real- just avoid dropping the delay time below 10 seconds as you'll end up with a flanging/comb filter effect.

You can do that process- slightly affecting a split of one sound in any way; even a basic EQ shift of either channel (and corresponding boost/cut on the other) will create space.

And then theres reverb; generally, try and use your studio and microphone positions to create this, but you c an always use a reverb unit- I wouldn't advise using a huge hall preset, just fiddle with the various parameters until you like the echo...Generally, turn up the reverb until its clearly audible and then back it off by about 6dB.

Basically everything is home recorded with Sonar, genre is funeral doom. I'm still quite a beginner, so still grasping the ropes of the basics, especially when it comes to EQ-ing. Hope I can get some advice.

Basically everything is home recorded with Sonar, genre is funeral doom. I'm still quite a beginner, so still grasping the ropes of the basics, especially when it comes to EQ-ing. Hope I can get some advice.

I've only listened to The Sun Is Almighty; I like it. I think you could quieten down the hi hats a bit; they sizzle, so maybe just an EQ cut at about 8kHz; only by a few dB.

The vocals- I would possibly quieten the reverb a bit, and cut some of the low end too.

The piano- maybe add some more reverb to make it more spacious and not so dry sounding. The keyboard sounds in general sound a bit too obvious, and because they don't last for a long time, you might wanna add delay, or have a long string sound constantly playing, to add texture...

Guitars- I would try gating the dry signal, so you don't have as much string sound, particularly the bit that starts at about 47-48 seonds; it would sound tighter if you could cut out those little noises.

Giving a mix more space can mean several things; firstly, we might mean a wide stereo image. Double tracking guitars, or even just a basic pseudo-stereo will do that ie. record a guitar line, feed a mono signal to one channel, pan it hard left; take a split of the guitar line, feed it through a delay unti with about 10-20milliseconds of delay and the lowest feedback setting, and pan that signal hard right. This can sound a bit amateur, but if you automate the delay TIME (only by 3-4 ms) it can sound a bit more real- just avoid dropping the delay time below 10 seconds as you'll end up with a flanging/comb filter effect.

what i mean by space is headroom (i guess this is the word i'm looking for),usually found in black and doom metal albums,beside the the stereo imaginary you can hear some sort of silence in the mix(if that makes sense)
i usually record the guitar 2 or 4 times rather than using delay because it gives more heaviness.

_________________"Death eats away from the inside Life eats away from the outside In between... in between"Last.fm

That guitar mixing section on Andy Sneap's site is really good. It talks about all the frequency areas in detail, and matches up very well with my own experiences getting a solid guitar tone that works well within the mix.

Edit : Just deleted my stupid question.and now with new question, how to EQ guitar and bass and should we do any compression ??

Don't compress the guitars (only if you have clean guitars with many peaks) but you have to do (parallel) compression on the bassguitar.Keep in mind that you want to get less peaks ánd remain a solid body.

so i just got my interface and mic in today, iv tested it out w/o my amp, and my guitar comes in clean, as does my bass, both w/ vst's. now my issues are with vst's. my lexicon alpha interface came with cubase LE5, and i cant seem to figure out how to record my instrument, in addition to using my own VST's. iv tried created both instrument and audio tracks, but neither will pic up my guitar or mic, even when the input is set to my interface. With VST's, people have said put them in the vst plugin folder, which i have, but i cannot find anywhere that allows me to select my vst's in the program, in regular cubase, iv seen a browse button in the add instrument track menu to select vst's, but LE5 dosent have this, so im unsure,

now half of my vst's work in audacity, aswell as i can easily record my guitars and mic. most single vst's work, but when i use , for example, the tone bytes pedals vst, or vst's that are suppose to have multiple pedals, audacity pulls up messages saying im missing "spring2.sem", or something like that. Im unsure if im missing something with the plugin, or with audacity.

I have a question about compression. I'm just starting on doing live recording (only done digital programming/sequencing before now, and I'm pretty much a noob. I had a question in The Recording Process, but maybe it would be better suited here:

"Is it bad that the gain on my mixer's recording channel is basically all the way up? If it isn't, Garage Band hardly registers my track's level at all and the wave form is essentially invisible."

I put some minimal compression on the tracks just to boost the level so I'm not turning my speaker up excessively to make up for it, since that ends up causing feedback.

"What is the basic or standard state my mixer and equipment should be in when recording? What kind of signal level is normal?

Question 1:A bit puzzled with this: trying to mix black metal and old school death metal kick drums...On certain records, they sound quite un-processed (i.e. seeming to have lots of 'natural acoustic sound' and mids), yet still cut through the mix.Whenever I apply the basic process (boost 70-100 Hz; deep scoop from 200 to 500+, and a boost around 5 kHz for click) I immediately end up with a decent sound, but it sounds too processed, yet the only way to cut through. Guitars have been high-passed at 100-150 Hz though. Bass guitar not even applied yet.

(There is also - parallel - compression on them.)

Question 2:Does anyone have some experience-based tips&tricks for toms? Especially on how to get them tight, punchy yet full.

Try messing about with the EQ on your kick. Experiment, try things that you don't think will sound good, and you might find something that works. I'm not really too sure what else to suggest, I don't have much experience with that rawer sound.

With toms, the most important thing to do is to keep them all consistent - so, balance the levels, and then any EQ, compression, and effects you apply should be very similar on all of them. Compression is your friend, and parallel compression is always useful.

I wasn't sure whether I should create a new thread for this but I really want to progress from making vanilla recordings on Audacity to to making something semi-pro and start mixing etc. I came across this online course on music production from Berklee. Some of you might be interested. It runs for 6 weeks and requires about 6-8 hours of work per week. To a recording/mixing newbie like me, it sounds pretty good. The course is outlined in the links below and there's an intro video for the same as well. It starts on July 19th.

I'm still very much a novice when it comes to recording and mixing, so any tips to improve the sound would help. In particular, how can I get the guitars to pop out more? A lot of them time I find they seem too buried.

- Rhythm guitar: 100 right and 100 left, but the left track will sound twice less louder, I just put it there so it doesn't feel empty.

- Lead guitar: 45% Left

- Solo guitar (usually 45% right)

- Bass: It depends upon which amp I choose but usually I just put it in the middle (0%), or 100% left and 100% right

- Drums: I place them as they sound when you play them

When I use orchestral instruments, I place them where they actually belong in a real orchestra, unless the main instrumental don't allow it.

Once everything is panned, I use the sound triggers of each instrument to make everything sound equal and clean. After that, I add an EQ to the master track and I lower the volume until it doesn't sounds higher than -3db. Then I add lots of compression, after adding the compression I use a plugin called "You wha shock", it's a compression that makes the sound much more percussive, but at the same time it doesn't increase frequencies. I Use EQ on the rhythm guitar to give it a thicker sound, and I use it on the lead guitar to give it a thinner sound.

Once this is done, I add reverb on the main track to give the song a more epic and powerful sound.

Nothing fancy, I'm not a pro but this suits me just fine for the moment.

For years I've been more or less self taught in the mixing/mastering department. This thread will likely cause me to remaster my new album--there's a lot of good information here. Thanks for creating countless additional hours of work for me! Hah!

I just started recording some new material and have found myself experimenting a bit when it comes to panning the guitars. On all my previous recordings I panned the 2 rhythm guitars 100% left and right. But I was just messing around and found that I get a bit of a fuller, warmer sound with them panned around 85% each side. Though I have yet to record bass, leads, vox etc so maybe it won't sound so good once everything else is added.

How much do you guys (and gals) pan your rhythm guitars? Pros/cons to doing it 100% vs less than 100% each side?

I wasn't sure whether I should create a new thread for this but I really want to progress from making vanilla recordings on Audacity to to making something semi-pro and start mixing etc. I came across this online course on music production from Berklee. Some of you might be interested. It runs for 6 weeks and requires about 6-8 hours of work per week. To a recording/mixing newbie like me, it sounds pretty good. The course is outlined in the links below and there's an intro video for the same as well. It starts on July 19th.

I am actually starting my online courses through Berklee online on January 12th, working towards my "Bachelor of Professional Studies" degree (3 year program) in music production. To say I am excited would be an understatement.